Vasily Grossman

VASILY SEMIONOVICH GROSSMAN (1905-1964) was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, in what is now Ukraine. In 1934 he published both "In the Town of Berdichev" - a short story that won him immediate acclaim - and the novel Glückauf , about Donbas miners. During the Second World War, he worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star ; his "The Hell of Treblinka" (1944) was one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp to be published in any language. His long novel Stalingrad was...See more

VASILY SEMIONOVICH GROSSMAN (1905-1964) was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, in what is now Ukraine. In 1934 he published both "In the Town of Berdichev" - a short story that won him immediate acclaim - and the novel Glückauf , about Donbas miners. During the Second World War, he worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star ; his "The Hell of Treblinka" (1944) was one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp to be published in any language. His long novel Stalingrad was published in 1952. During the next few years Grossman worked on his second Stalingrad novel: Life and Fate . In February 1961, the KGB confiscated his typescript, but he was able to continue working on Everything Flows , which is yet more critical of the Soviet regime, until his last days. The short stories he wrote during his last three years are among his supreme achievements; English translations are included in The Road. Grossman died on 14 September 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev, in which his mother had died. See less